Inside Icon Map: James Dales on the Housing Geospatial Podcast
James Dales, CEO and co-founder of Icon Map, recently joined Chris Kinnear for their 20th episode of the Housing Geospatial Podcast to talk through the story behind Icon Map and where mapping fits into a wider data strategy.
As many of you know by now, James got into web development to fund his way through university, running a small web design company with a housemate in the late 1990s. Even something as ordinary now as a dealership locator, letting someone type in a postcode and find their nearest branch, had to be built from scratch, since nothing like it existed yet. From there, he moved through hospitality technology and public sector data consulting before eventually running Power BI globally for Avanade. It was an aerospace customer that brought him into mapping properly, after asking him to build a plugin that could track every aircraft and engine in their fleet live on a map inside Power BI. That plugin ended up on stage at a Microsoft keynote, in a slot between Satya Nadella and Michelle Obama, and James carried on developing a free version for Power BI's marketplace in his spare time. Eventually, the support requests were eating into his evenings, which led to the creation of Tekantis in 2024 and the development of Icon Map Pro.
That journey also shaped James's view of where geospatial data belongs. "Personally, I don't believe geospatial data is special," he explains in the episode. Instead of keeping it in a separate GIS system, it can sit in the same cloud storage as the rest of an organisation's data, using cloud native geospatial formats to store huge datasets and only pull back the part of the map someone is actually looking at. In James's words, "the map is brought to the data", helping to reduce duplication and the number of systems that need to be kept in sync.
From there, the conversation moves into what that looks like in practice. Rail networks can use it to track maintenance, while police forces can map incidents alongside census and deprivation data. In construction in the Middle East, the same approach is being used on a much larger scale, with entire cities treated as single projects. Teams can use a time slider to follow a development from the initial land survey through to completed buildings, while layering in underground infrastructure such as water and cabling. In effect, it's a geospatial Gantt chart for an entire city.
The conversation then turns to what's next for Icon Map, including Icon Map for Fabric, a new product sitting alongside Power BI within Microsoft Fabric. It brings multi-layer mapping, CAD and BIM imports, and digital twins connected to live data, with one example showing a wind turbine model turning to match the real wind direction using live weather data.
For anyone working with housing, construction or other location-based data, the episode offers a useful look at what happens when geospatial data becomes part of the wider data environment, rather than something that sits separately from it.
Listen to the full episode: Housing Geospatial, Episode 20
Also available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.